KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Two planes from an Indonesian acrobatic air team clipped wings and crashed Sunday during a practice session ahead of an air show in Malaysia, officials said. All four pilots ejected and are safe.

The pilots from both planes ejected from their aircraft after the jets went out of control and landed safely with their parachutes, said a Malaysian defence official who declined to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media.

A house and a car caught fire due to falling debris from the plane, the organizers of the air show, held on northern Langkawi island, said in a statement.

Malaysian Fire and Rescue Department Emergency response personnel carry an unidentified Indonesian pilot on a stretcher following a crash in Langkawi.

The four pilots were under observation at a hospital in Langkawi.

Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein visited them at the hospital and tweeted: “Thankful that all 4 pilots are safe, their spirits remained high.”

The Indonesian team is one of five scheduled to perform at the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition, set for March 17-21.

Ow Eng Tiong / Associated PressPilots from Indonesia's Jupiter aerobatics team are ejected after a mid-air collision during a practice session at the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace (LIMA) exhibition in Malaysia, on Sunday.

SURABAYA, Indonesia — The search for a missing AirAsia jet carrying 162 people that disappeared more than 24 hours ago on a flight from Indonesia to Singapore resumed with first light Monday.

First Admiral Sigit Setiayana, the Naval Aviation Centre commander at the Surabaya air force base, said that 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships were talking part, along with ships and planes from Singapore and Malaysia.

Setiaya said visibility was good. “God willing, we can find it soon,” he told The Associated Press.

AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished in airspace thick with storm clouds on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Searchers had to fight against heavy rain on Sunday before work was suspended due to darkness.

The plane’s disappearance and suspected crash caps an astonishingly tragic year for air travel in Southeast Asia. The Malaysia-based carrier’s loss comes on top of the still-unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July over Ukraine.

At the Surabaya airport, passengers’ relatives pored over the plane’s manifest, crying and embracing. Nias Adityas, a housewife from Surabaya, was overcome with grief when she found the name of her husband, Nanang Priowidodo, on the list.

The 43-year-old tour agent had been taking a family of four on a trip to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia’s Lombok island, and had been happy to get the work.

“He just told me, ‘Praise God, this new year brings a lot of good fortune,”’ Adityas recalled, holding her grandson tight while weeping uncontrollably.

Nearly all the passengers and crew are Indonesians, who are frequent visitors to Singapore, particularly on holidays.

Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department says there’s no indication there are any Canadians on board a missing flight.

But a spokesperson said Canadian officials are working to confirm that with local authorities.

The Airbus A320 took off Sunday morning from Indonesia’s second-largest city and was about halfway to Singapore when it vanished from radar. The jet had been airborne for about 42 minutes.

There was no distress signal from the twin-engine, single-aisle plane, said Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia’s acting director general of transportation.

Suhaimi Abdullah / Getty ImagesA relative of a missing family member on board AirAsia flight QZ8501 speaks to the media outside the holding area at Changi Airport on Sunday in Singapore.

The last communication between the cockpit and air traffic control was at 6:13 a.m. (6:13 p.m. EST Saturday), when one of the pilots “asked to avoid clouds by turning left and going higher to 10,360 metres,” Murjatmodjo said. The jet was last seen on radar at 6:16 a.m. and was gone a minute later, he told reporters.

Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia launched a search-and-rescue operation near Belitung island in the Java Sea, the area where the airliner lost contact with the ground.

AirAsia group CEO Tony Fernandes flew to Surabaya and told a news conference that the focus for now should be on the search and the families rather than the cause of the incident.

“We have no idea at the moment what went wrong,” said Fernandes, a Malaysian businessman who founded the low-cost carrier in 2001. “Let’s not speculate at the moment.”

Malaysia-based AirAsia has a good safety record and had never lost a plane before.

“This is my worst nightmare,” Fernandes tweeted.

But Malaysia itself has already endured a catastrophic year, with 239 people still missing from Flight 370 and all 298 people aboard Flight 17 killed when it was shot down over rebel-held territory in Ukraine.

AirAsia said Flight 8501 was on its submitted flight plan but had requested a change due to weather.

Sunardi, a forecaster at Indonesia’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, said dense storm clouds were detected up to 13,400 metres in the area at the time.

“There could have been turbulence, lightning and vertical as well as horizontal strong winds within such clouds,” said Sunardi, who like many Indonesians uses only one name.

It all started one year ago, almost to the day. Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a., the Weeknd, released his debut mixtape, House of Balloons, online, for free, on March 21, 2011. You could call it the smartest thing he’s ever done, and you wouldn’t be wrong<strong>By T’Cha Dunlevy</strong>
It all started one year ago, almost to the day. Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a., the Weeknd, released his debut mixtape,<em> House of Balloons</em>, online, for free, on March 21, 2011. You could call it the smartest thing he’s ever done, and you wouldn’t be wrong.
Not that I have a comprehensive list of every move the Ethiopian-Canadian Toronto native has made in his 22 years, but let’s just say this was a stroke of genius matched only by his music.
[np-related]
The collection of raw, tripped-out R&B tunes placed him squarely on the cutting edge, while establishing him as the latest in a long line of talented singers who somehow put their finger on the pulse of a moment in time and thereby come to encapsulate it.
He has released two more mixtapes in the interim — <em>Thursday</em>, on Aug. 18, and <em>Echoes of Silence</em>, on Dec. 21 — both in the same format, with the same non-price tag (thus putting him among the front-runners of those capitalizing on the age of free-traded downloads). Both were as entrancing as the debut, cementing the Weeknd as the voice of contemporary soul in 2011-12.
There was a time, not far back, when this could not have happened — for a kid from Canada to so quickly become the epitome of club-land cool in the U.S. and abroad.
Sure, Drake (who, not coincidentally, lent his considerable clout to the Weeknd’s meteoric ascent) paved the way: musically (gravity-free emo-soul-rap), strategically (making his name via online mixtapes) and in precocious attitude.
But the Weeknd took Drake’s lead and ran with it. His tightly guarded persona is more mysterious, his music darker — more R&B than hip hop, smoother yet somehow edgier — and his output more prolific.
His murky tales of drugs, sex and sketchy come-ons are unapologetically single-minded. And yet his music is none the weaker for it. If anything, the consistency is liberating; like the mood-over-melody focus of the synthed-out production, it functions as a tone-setting backdrop to Tesfaye’s slippery vocal meanderings.
This is late-late-night music that evokes an endless post-closing-time daze, where accumulated intoxicants have made reality a relative concept. The Weeknd doesn’t just sing about it, he puts you in the room with him. Songs stretch into the ether, blurring together as you wonder how long you’ve been here, high on these strangely hypnotic sounds.
“I always want you when I’m coming down,” Tesfaye coos on <em>Coming Down</em>, off <em>House of Balloons</em>. Listen to him long enough, and you’ll need to come down, too.
There are antecedents. The Weeknd owes debts to Kanye West’s groundbreaking synth-soul-noir album, 808s, and Heartbreak, to trippy Swedish electro-pop duo the Knife and, yes, to Drake. But also to R. Kelly, Sade and, vocally, to Michael Jackson (whom he repays with an uncanny cover of the song, Dirty Diana, to lead off Echoes of Silence). And let’s not forget Akon, for his elastic croon; and oft-compared contemporary The-Dream, for his more pop-centric sense of atmosphere. Or how about the boundary-pushing slow jams of ‘90s R&B adventurers Maxwell and Aaliyah?
Before anyone could box him in, the Weeknd was sampling ‘80s alternative icons, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and current ambient-indie act, Beach House. Yeah, he’s hip like that.
Most impressive, he touches on all these references without losing focus, without ripping off, and while crafting a distinctly modern sound all his own. From there, he has free rein.
He gets away with heavy-metal guitars and reggae grooves (Life of the Party), acoustic ballads (Rolling Stone), singing en francais (Montreal) and voice-morphing, dubstep-tinged fantasy (Initiation).
It ain’t always pretty, but that’s part of the appeal. The Weeknd’s twisted, predatorial seduction style has garnered him more than 400,000 followers on Twitter, widespread critical acclaim, and a bated-breath frenzy surrounding whom he’ll sign with to finally engage the music industry on more conventional terms — assuming, of course, that day will come; he may have more tricks up his sleeve yet.
Despite repeated predictions of his demise, the Weeknd has shown impressive staying power. One year and three mixtapes later (who does that?), he’s still a hot topic. House of Balloons was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in September, and the Weeknd was hired to remix Florence and the Machine’s Shake It Out. In November, he collaborated on several tracks off Drake’s second album, Take Care, and reworked Lady Gaga’s Marry the Night for her Born This Way: The Remix album.
As the download frenzy for Echoes of Silence crashed his server in December, his debut landed on numerous year-end Top 10 lists (The New York Times, Billboard, Pitchfork, mine). Then came the official video to his song, The Knowing — an arty affair reminiscent of the surreal, cut-and-paste collage esthetic of West’s Power video.
Tickets for the Weeknd’s concert at Metropolis this Friday went on sale less than three weeks ago, and sold out soon after. He’s slotted to make his U.S. debut at Coachella in April, and to headline the Pitchfork stage at Barcelona’s San Miguel Primavera Sound Festival in June.
There is rumour of another mixtape in the near future, and an album proper by year’s end.
All to say there is no rest for the Weeknd. And the way things are going, the best may be yet to come.

Airline pilots routinely fly around thunderstorms, said John Cox, a former accident investigator. Using on-board radar, flight crews can typically see a storm forming from more than 100 miles away.

In such cases, pilots have plenty of time to find a way around the storm cluster or look for gaps to fly through, he said.

“It’s not like you have to make an instantaneous decision,” Cox said. Storms can be hundreds of miles long, but “because a jet moves at 8 miles a minute, if you to go 100 miles out of your way, it’s not a problem.”

It was unclear based on comments from authorities what air traffic controllers saw on their screens when the plane disappeared from radar, he noted.

HandoutThe Weeknd.

Authorities have not said whether they lost only the secondary radar target, which is created by the plane’s transponder, or whether the primary radar target, which is created by energy reflected from the plane’s body, was lost as well, Cox said.

The plane had an Indonesian captain and a French co-pilot, five cabin crew members and 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant, the airline said in a statement. Among the passengers were three South Koreans, a Malaysian, a British national and his 2-year-old Singaporean daughter. The rest were Indonesians.

AirAsia said the captain more than 20,000 flying hours, of which 6,100 were with AirAisa on the Airbus 320. The first officer had 2,275 flying hours.

At Surabaya airport, dozens of relatives sat in a room waiting for news, many of them talking on mobile phones and crying.

So far, the film about a former military captain who is transported to Mars, has generated US$184-million in ticket sales worldwide. That is far shy from the audience needed to earn back the movie's estimated US$250-million production budget.
Walt Disney Co shares fell 1% in after hour trading on Monday after the company said it expects mega-budget science-fiction movie <em>John Carter</em> will lose about US$200-million in the current quarter.
The company issued the forecast in a statement that projected the studio division would report an overall operating loss of US$80-million to US$120-million in the fiscal second quarter that ends March 31.
[np-related]
Disney shares dropped about 1% to US$43 in after-hours trading from an earlier close of US$43.44 on the New York Stock Exchange.
So far, the film about a former military captain who is transported to Mars, has generated US$184-million in ticket sales worldwide. That is far shy from the audience needed to earn back the movie's estimated US$250-million production budget, plus tens of millions more that Disney spent on advertising.
Even before the movie opened, Wall Street analysts had projected <em>John Carter</em> would lose tens of millions of dollars as industry tracking showed little interest in the film.
<em>John Carter</em> opened on March 9 and took in about US$30-million over its first three days at U.S. and Canadian theatres, finishing the weekend in second place behind family film <em>The Lorax</em>.

Dimas, who goes by one name, said his wife, 30-year-old Ratri Sri Andriani, had been on the flight to lead a group of 25 Indonesian tourists on a trip to Singapore and Malaysia. He was holding out hope that the plane had made an emergency landing.

“We can just pray and hope that all those aboard are safe,” said Dimas, who was surrounded by Ratri’s parents and friends at the airport crisis centre.

The missing aircraft was delivered to AirAsia in October 2008, and the plane had accumulated about 23,000 flight hours during some 13,600 flights, Airbus said in a statement.

The aircraft had last undergone scheduled maintenance on Nov. 16, according to AirAsia.

The airline, which has dominated cheap travel in Southeast Asia for years, flies short routes of just a few hours, connecting the region’s large cities. Recently, it has tried to expand into long-distance flying through sister airline AirAsia X.

Fernandes, who is the face of AirAsia and an active Twitter user, stirred controversy earlier this year after incorrectly tweeting that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had landed safely.

William Waldock, an expert on air crash search and rescue with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, cautioned against drawing comparisons to Flight 370.

The circumstances bode well for finding Flight 8501 since the intended flight time was less than two hours, and there is a known position where the plane disappeared, he said.

The A320 family of jets, which includes the A319 and A321, has a good safety record, with just 0.14 fatal accidents per million takeoffs, according to a safety study published by Boeing in August.

Flight 8501 disappeared while at its cruising altitude, which is usually the safest part of a trip. Just 10 per cent of fatal crashes from 2004 to 2013 occurred while a plane was in that stage of flight, the safety report said.

Ten-year-old Christopher Incha Prasetya cried when his parents canceled a four-day trip to Singapore because his grandfather was ill. A day later, he had to be convinced the plane that would have flown them there was missing.

Christopher, his parents and two siblings were among 26 people who didn’t show up after buying tickets for Sunday’s AirAsia flight 8501 from the central Indonesian city of Surabaya. There were 155 passengers and seven crew members on board the plane, which lost contact with airport controllers at 7:24 a.m. Indonesian time Sunday and sparked a multination search.

“The kids were still on holidays and Christopher was very upset when we said that we couldn’t go after all,” his mother, Inge Goreti Ferdiningsih, 37, said by phone from Surabaya. “When we told him the plane was missing, he didn’t believe us until we showed him the tickets.”

Ferdiningsih, an accountant, said she and her businessman husband, Chandra Susanto, paid more than 8 million rupiah ($750) for return flights on the low-cost carrier for their family, which included seven-year-old daughter Nadine and son Felix, five.

They booked the trip in June and had planned to spend three nights on the Singapore resort island of Sentosa, with the children eager to visit a water theme park. With her father ill, Ferdiningsih said they decided to call off the vacation the day before the flight.

There were three infants among the 26 people who were reported as no-shows for the flight, the passenger manifest showed.

Of the 155 passengers who boarded there were 138 adults, 16 children and one infant. The plane was carrying one Singaporean, a Malaysian, a person from France, one from the U.K., three from South Korea and 155 Indonesians, according to Malaysia-based carrier AirAsia.

Flight QZ8501 started in Surabaya at 5:35 a.m. local time yesterday and was due to arrive in Singapore at 8.30 a.m. There’s a one hour time difference between the two countries.

The pilot of the Airbus Group NV single-aisle jet had requested to fly at a higher altitude because of clouds, Indonesia Air Transport Director Djoko Murjatmodjo said in Jakarta yesterday. The journey usually takes about two hours.

The passenger manifest suggests there were other families who missed the flight. The Facebook page of Christianawati Renoult, who was scheduled to travel with an infant, listed Daniel Candrawinoto and Gideon Satrio as her sons. Their names were also on the manifest, reported as missing the flight.

Related

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//flight-qz8501s-no-shows-the-26-people-who-missed-the-plane-that-disappear/feed/0stdIndonesia PlaneMH370 had 1,000 possible flight paths and crashed in area of ocean the size of Quebechttp://news.nationalpost.com//mh370-had-1000-possible-flight-paths-and-crashed-in-area-of-ocean-the-size-of-quebec
http://news.nationalpost.com//mh370-had-1000-possible-flight-paths-and-crashed-in-area-of-ocean-the-size-of-quebec#commentsMon, 08 Sep 2014 17:42:46 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=514140

Six months after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 the man leading the operation to find it has admitted that there are 1,000 possible flight paths it may have taken before crashing into the Indian Ocean.

Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is coordinating the search, said his team faced an “intimidating” and “unprecedented” challenge as it prepared to launch a one-year offshore search operation that could cost up to $47.5 million.

The only near certainty is that MH370 came down in a remote and inhospitable expanse of ocean that, at nearly 1.6 million square kilometres, is larger than Quebec and more than three times the size of Spain.

Asked if he could guarantee that the plane’s wreckage would be found, Mr. Dolan said: “I’d like to be that confident, but this is unprecedented. I don’t want to create a false hope. But I don’t want to write it off either, because we do think we have a reasonable prospect.”

MH370 disappeared in the early hours of March 8 as it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. There were 227 passengers and 12 crew on board the Boeing 777.

Despite a massive multinational search, no trace of the plane, or its black box, has been found. Now, six months after the biggest mystery in modern aviation history began, the search is about to recommence.

It will see three vessels deployed over the coming weeks. Simultaneously, an international team of experts will continue to analyze “the backside off” data obtained from the flight’s satellite communications and flight simulations to try to further narrow the priority search areas.

Investigators have for months been convinced that the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, somewhere along a 4,000-kilometre curve known as the “seventh arc.”

It is now considered a certainty that the plane crashed somewhere within a 1.6 million sq km area around the seventh arc. But that area was far too big to be “practically searchable,” Mr. Dolan admitted. A “range of priority areas” totalling around 100,000 sq km had been agreed, he said.

On Saturday, Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister, visited Malaysia and promised that the search for MH370 would last for “as long as it needs to scour the seabed.”

The wreckage would only be found if the governments bankrolling the hugely expensive and time-consuming search stay the course, he warned.

“Nominally, it can go on forever until you have eliminated everything. But, with the sort of area we are talking about, there will come a point I would assume where the governments say, ‘It is good money after bad and we no longer wish to continue?'” he said. “But that is a matter for government. I am not making that decision.”

Investigators believe MH370 changed course as a result of a “deliberate act” but appear to have reached a dead-end in trying to discover who provoked its mysterious disappearance.

GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty ImagesThis file photo taken from a Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) P-3K2-Orion aircraft on April 13, 2014 shows co-pilot and Squadron Leader Brett McKenzie helping to look for objects during the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, far off the coast of Perth.

Kelli Lunt/Australia Department of Defence via Getty ImagesThe Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has confirmed that missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is not in the search zone where acoustic pings were detected.

WANG ZHAO/AFP/Getty ImagesA man stands in front of a billboard in support of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 as Chinese relatives of passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have a meeting at the Metro Park Hotel in Beijing on April 23, 2014.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Carried by soldiers and draped in the national flag, coffins carrying Malaysian victims of Flight MH17 returned home Friday to a country still searching for those onboard another doomed jet and a government battling the political fallout of both tragedies.

The bodies and ashes of 20 victims from the Malaysia Airlines jet that was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July were given full military honours and a day of national mourning was declared, the first in the country’s history.

Many people in offices in the nation of 30 million observed a minute’s silence as the hearses were driven from the tarmac of Kuala Lumpur International Airport to private funerals. Some public trains in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, stopped operating.

All 298 people onboard died when the jet was shot down over an area of Ukraine controlled by pro-Russia separatists on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The victims included 43 Malaysians and 195 Dutch nationals. An international investigation is ongoing, but no one has been arrested.

The return of the bodies also represented a political triumph for Prime Minister Najib Razak, whose already shaky popularity ratings were hit by his handling of the still unsolved disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and its 239 passengers and crew in March.

“Today we mourn the loss of our people. Today, we begin to bring them home,” Najib said in a statement. “Our thoughts and our prayers are with the families and friends of those who lost their lives. Today we stand with you, united as one.”

Najib claimed personal credit for negotiating a deal with pro-Russian separatists for the return of all the bodies. Few details have been released over what the separatists were given in return, and some critics have said that the negotiations with people many regard as terrorists set a dangerous precedent.

“Everyone wants closure for the families, there is no question,” said Bridget Welsh, a research associate at the National Taiwan University. “But on the other hand, they (Najib’s advisers) saw this as an opportunity for him to look good. It was critical for the government to be seen as responsive and differentiate itself from the handling of MH370.”

The victims were carried aboard a specially chartered Malaysia Airlines jet from Amsterdam, where they were taken from the crash site. Three had already been cremated. The coffins were individually lowered from the plane and slowly carried by teams of eight soldiers to waiting hearses.

AFP PHOTO/ MANAN VATSYAYANAMANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty ImagesColleagues of Malaysia Airlines MH17 chief stewardess Dora Shahila Kassim attend her burial ceremony in Kuala Lumpur on August 22, 2014. Millions of black-Clad Malaysians fell silent August 22 in tribute to their 43 countrymen killed in the MH17 disaster as the remains were brought home and laid to rest amid deep sorrow and anger.

“They were casualties of war, unfortunately, and the world community needs to work toward a solution to these conflicts,” said Abdul Mueiem, a Malaysia Airlines pilot who attended the ceremony. “Everyone is feeling sad and depressed, but the important thing is that Malaysia Airlines is one big family, and we are together with the nation.”

The repatriation was the first of the Malaysian passengers and crew on the flight. The government has said that the bodies of the remaining Malaysians would follow soon.

The country may never witness a similar homecoming for the victims on board Flight 370. The plane went missing on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and is believed to have crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.

After several surface and underwater searches have turned up nothing, a new underwater search is expected to begin in September and take up to a year to search 60,000 square kilometres (23,000 square miles) of the Indian Ocean seabed.

Assuming the plane is found, the depth of the ocean will make recovery of any bodies difficult. Relatives might also prefer the bodies to stay where they are.

AFP PHOTO / MOHD RASFANMOHD RASFAN/AFP/Getty ImagesMohamed Salleh, (C) the father of Malaysia Airlines flight attendant Nur Shazana, one of the Malaysians who perished aboard flight MH17 that was downed in eastern Ukraine, touches her coffin during a burial ceremony in Putrajaya, outside Kuala Lumpur on August 22, 2014. Black-clad Malaysians paused for a minute of silence Friday on a nationwide day of mourning held to sombrely welcome home the first remains of its 43 citizens killed in the MH17 disaster.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//remains-of-mh17-victims-return-to-mourning-malaysia-as-government-faces-fallout-of-two-plane-tragedies/feed/7stdSoldiers carry a coffin with the remains of a Malaysian victim from the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that crashed in Ukraine during a ceremony at the Bunga Raya complex at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang on August 22, 2014. A plane carrying the first remains of the 43 Malaysians killed in the MH17 disaster returned home, where they were to be sombrely received on a national day of mourning.AFP PHOTO/ MANAN VATSYAYANAMANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty ImagesAFP PHOTO / MOHD RASFANMOHD RASFAN/AFP/Getty ImagesDutch man cheats death twice: Cyclist booked on flights MH370 and MH17, but changed plans at last minutehttp://news.nationalpost.com//dutch-man-cheats-death-twice-cyclist-booked-on-flights-mh370-and-mh17-but-changed-plans-at-last-minute
http://news.nationalpost.com//dutch-man-cheats-death-twice-cyclist-booked-on-flights-mh370-and-mh17-but-changed-plans-at-last-minute#commentsMon, 21 Jul 2014 01:02:12 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=494370

A Dutch man cheated death on both recent doomed Malaysia Airlines flights after booking tickets on MH370 and MH17 but changing plans at the last minute.

Maarten De Jonge, 29, a cyclist who rides with Malaysia’s Terengganu Cycling Team, switched from MH370 in March to avoid a lengthy stopover and switched from MH17 last week to take a later flight and save money.

“It’s inconceivable,” he told Dutch public broadcaster RTV Oost. “I am very sorry for the passengers and their families, yet I am very pleased I’m unharmed.”

My story is ultimately nothing compared to the misery in which so many people are dead

In a statement on his website, he said he was “overwhelmed” by the international responses to his fortune in narrowly avoiding death but said the focus should be on the victims and their families.

“How happy I am for myself and my family that I was on this flight and did not take it the last moment; my story is ultimately nothing compared to the misery in which so many people are dead,” he said. “Attention should be paid to the victims and survivors. Wishing everyone affected by this disaster a lot of strength.”

BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty ImagesUkrainian rescue workers search for bodies at the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, near the village of Grabove, in the region of Donetsk on July 20, 2014.

De Jonge said his ordeal would not deter him from flying on Malaysia Airlines and he plans to go ahead with a flight on the airline to Malaysia via Frankfurt.

“I have been lucky twice,” he said.

“You should try not to worry too much because then you won’t get anywhere. I could have taken that one [MH17] just as easily.”

The attack on MH17 in airspace above Ukraine came less than five months after the disappearance of MH370 and has led to a series of people whose lives were caught up in both flights.

An Australian woman, Kaylene Mann, lost her brother Rod Burrows and his wife Mary after the disappearance of MH370 in March and lost her stepdaughter, Maree Rizk, who was travelling with her husband on MH17.

HRABOVE, Ukraine — Ukraine accused Russia on Saturday of helping separatist rebels destroy evidence at the crash site of a Malaysia Airlines plane shot down in rebel-held territory — a charge the rebels denied.

As dozens of victims’ bodies lay in bags by the side of the road baking in the summer heat, international monitors at the crash site Saturday said they were still being hampered by heavily armed rebels.

“Some of the body bags are open and the damage to the corpses is very, very bad. It is very difficult to look at,” OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw told reporters in a phone call from the site, where the smell of decaying bodies was unmistakable.

He said the 24-member delegation was given further access Saturday to the crash site but their movements were being limited by the rebels. The site sprawls 20 square kilometres across sunflower and wheat fields between two villages in eastern Ukraine.

“We have to be very careful with our movements because of all the security,” Bociurkiw said. “We are unarmed civilians, so we are not in a position to argue with people with heavy arms.”

AFP PHOTO / DOMINIQUE FAGETA man wearing military fatigue stops traffic near the site of the crash of a Malaysia Airlines plane.

In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s transport minister says the country is “deeply concerned” that the site “has not been properly secured.”

Liow Tiong Lai said at a news conference Saturday that “the integrity of the site has been compromised and there are indications that vital evidence has not been preserved in place.”

He called for immediate access for Malaysia’s team at the site to retrieve human remains. He said “we need the support of the world to ensure that the site is not tampered, that we have access to the site.”

Liow, who again defended Malaysia Airlines’ flying in Ukrainian airspace, said a Malaysian team arrived in Kyiv earlier Saturday, two days after the plane went down.

Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was carrying 298 people from 13 nations when it was shot down Thursday in eastern Ukraine close to the Russian border, an area that has seen months of clashes between government troops and pro-Russia separatists.

At an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. pointed blame at the separatists, saying Washington believes the jetliner likely was downed by an SA-11 missile and “we cannot rule out technical assistance from Russian personnel.”

The government in Kyiv said militiamen have removed 38 bodies from the crash site and have taken them to the rebel-held city of Donetsk. It said the bodies were transported with the assistance of specialists with distinct Russian accents.

The rebels are also “seeking large transports to carry away plane fragments to Russia,” the Ukrainian government said Saturday.

In Donetsk, separatist leader Alexander Borodai denied that any bodies had been transferred or that the rebels had in any way interfered with the work of observers. He said he encouraged the involvement of the international community in assisting with the cleanup before the conditions of the bodies worsens significantly.

As emergency workers put some 80 bodies into bags Saturday, Bociurkiw stressed that his team was not at the site to conduct a full-scale investigation.

“We are looking at security on the perimeter of the crash site, looking at the status in the condition of the bodies, the status in the condition of the debris, and also personal belongings,” he said.

AFP PHOTO/ BULENT KILICSelf-proclaimed prime minister of the pro-Russian separatist "Donetsk People's Republic" Alexander Borodai ruled out on July 18, 2014 a temporary truce with government forces but pledged to allow investigators to access the site of downed Malaysia Airlines jet MH17.

Ukraine also called on Moscow to insist that the pro-Russia rebels grant international experts the ability to conduct a thorough, impartial investigation into the downing of the plane _ echoing a demand that President Barack Obama issued a day earlier from Washington.

“The integrity of the site has been compromised, and there are indications that vital evidence has not been preserved in place,” Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
He called for immediate access for Malaysia’s team at the site to retrieve human remains.

Ukraine says it has passed along all information on developments relating to Thursday’s downing to its European and U.S. partners.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed in a phone call Saturday that an independent, international commission led by the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO, should be granted swift access to the crash site, said government spokesman Georg Streiter.

The commission should examine the circumstances of the crash and recover the victims, said Streiter, adding that Merkel urged Putin to use his influence over the separatists to make that happen.

AFP PHOTO / DOMINIQUE FAGETUkrainian rescue workers carry the body of a victim on a stretcher as others bodies of victims lay on the ground prior to being collected at the site of the crash of a Malaysia Airlines plane.

In the Netherlands, forensic teams fanned out across the country Saturday to collect material including DNA samples that will help positively identify the remains of the 192 Dutch victims.

Police said in a tweet that 40 pairs of detectives from the National Forensic Investigations Team would be visiting victims’ relatives over the coming days.

The location of the black boxes remains a mystery and the separatist leadership remained adamant Saturday that it had not located them. Bociurkiw also said he had received no information on their whereabouts.

Aviation experts say, however, not to expect too much from the flight data and cockpit voice recorders in understanding how Flight 17 was brought down.

The most useful evidence that’s likely to come from the crash scene is whether missile pieces can be found in the trail of debris that came down as the plane exploded, said John Goglia, a U.S. aviation safety expert and former National Transportation Safety Board member.

The operation of the Flight 17 doesn’t appear to be an issue, he said.

Obama called the downing of the plane “a global tragedy.”

“An Asian airliner was destroyed in European skies filled with citizens from many countries, so there has to be a credible international investigation into what happened,” he said.

AP Photo / Evgeniy MaloletkaThe hand of victim lies among the wreckage of the crashed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 lies near the village of Hrabove, eastern Ukraine, Saturday, July 19, 2014. World leaders demanded Friday that pro-Russia rebels who control the eastern Ukraine crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 give immediate, unfettered access to independent investigators to determine who shot down the plane.

Both the White House and the Kremlin have called for peace talks in the conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-speaking separatists who seek closer ties to Moscow. Heavy fighting took place Friday around Luhansk, less than 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the crash site, with 20 civilians reported killed.

Malaysia Airlines, meanwhile, said Saturday it has no immediate plans to fly the relatives of the 298 passengers and crew killed to visit the crash site in Ukraine because of security concerns.

A spokesman for the airline says next of kin are being cared for in Amsterdam while a team from the carrier, including security officials, was in Ukraine assessing the situation.

In the Netherlands, travellers flying out of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport laid flowers and signed a condolence book before boarding their flights Saturday, including those on the latest Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to Kuala Lumpur.

David McHugh in Kyiv, Ukraine; Mstyslav Chernov in Donetsk, Ukraine; Michael Corder in Amsterdam and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.￼ ￼ ￼

For Cor Pan, a Dutch holidaymaker heading for Kuala Lumpur with his girlfriend Neeltje Tol, boarding a Malaysia Airlines flight was an irresistible opportunity for black humour.

As he made his way down the sky bridge from gate G03 at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport, he paused to take a picture of the Boeing 777-200 that he and Ms Tol were about to board.

In a reference to the disappearance of flight MH370 in March, Mr Pan posted the picture on his Facebook page with the message: “If the plane disappears, this is what it looks like.”

His friends responded by wishing him a good holiday and reminding him to send back lots of photos, but within hours their messages would turn to fear, and then despair.

Flight MH17 pushed back from the gate at 11.14 a.m. BST, 14 minutes behind schedule, and took off at 11.30 a.m. for a flight that was scheduled to land at 10.50 p.m. A local plane spotter, Fred Neeleman, photographed the aircraft as it took off, as did another man, Tom Warners.

For the next 110 minutes, the flight was entirely uneventful. With a complement of 280 passengers and 15 crew, MH17 made its way over Germany, Poland and Ukraine, reaching its cruising altitude of 33,000 feet and flying straight and level, but at 1.21 p.m. radar contact was suddenly lost.

On the ground, Igor Strelkov – also known as Igor Girkin – the leader of the pro-Russian separatists fighting the Ukrainian government forces for control of eastern Ukraine, used his page on the social networking site Vkontakte to boast that his men had just shot down an aircraft. In a message posted at 2.50 p.m. BST, he wrote: “In the district of Torez an An-26 was just shot down. It crashed somewhere near the Progress mine.

“We warned them not to fly in ‘our skies.’ Here is video confirmation of the latest ‘fallen bird.’ The bird landed outside the residential zone, no peaceful civilians were injured.”

His post was accompanied by a video of a plume of black smoke rising from the ground, one of several videos that were posted online within two hours of MH17 going missing. It quickly became clear that an aircraft had indeed come down near the village of Grabovo in the Torez area, 25 miles from the Russian border, but the wreckage bore the distinctive white, red and blue livery of Malaysian Airlines.

Emergency crews who raced to the scene found wreckage and bodies strewn over a nine-mile area. Part of the aircraft, including at least one engine, had exploded when it hit the ground, leaving an area of blackened debris once the fires had been put out.

Other parts of the aircraft, and some of its passengers, had landed intact.

The fully dressed, unbloodied bodies of more than 100 passengers lay next to the broken seats in which they had hit the ground still strapped in by their seat belts. Passports and other personal effects were picked out by emergency workers identifying the dead passengers.

A large section of wing had come down within yards of two buildings, though all those living near the crash site appeared unharmed. Elsewhere, a section of the fuselage, its windows undamaged by the impact, lay in the middle of a field.

“I was working in the field on my tractor when I heard the sound of a plane and then a bang and shots. Then I saw the plane hit the ground and break in two. There was thick black smoke,” said an witness who gave his name only as Vladimir.

A separatist rebel from nearby Krasnyi Luch, who gave his name only as Sergei, said: “From my balcony I saw a plane begin to descend from a great height and then heard two explosions.”

The first confirmation that a passenger jet had come down came at 4.04 p.m., when the Reuters news agency reported that a Malaysian airliner had crashed in Ukraine.

Malaysia Airlines said on its Twitter feed that it “has lost contact of MH-17 from Amsterdam. The last known position was over Ukrainian airspace.”

By 4.29 p.m. the Russian Interfax news agency was reporting that the aircraft was “shot down.”

The finger of blame quickly pointed at the pro-Russian rebels, largely because of the earlier claim of shooting down an aircraft but also because a Ukrainian cargo aircraft had been shot down days before by a surface-to-air missile.

Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko described the incident as a “terrorist act,” having earlier said: “We do not exclude that the plane was shot down and confirm that the Ukraine armed forces did not fire at any targets in the sky.”

Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said the aircraft was hit by a missile fired from a Buk launcher, which can hit targets up to an altitude of 72,000 ft.

Two weeks ago, pro-Russian fighters from the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) boasted that they had captured Buk missiles and launchers when they overran a Ukrainian army garrison on June 29. The DPR posted a Twitter picture at the time of the vehicle-mounted missile system, but last night deleted the picture and denied they possessed such a weapon.

Andrei Purgin, the self-declared deputy prime minister of the DPR, said: “Of course, we do not have such systems. These arms are too heavy and too powerful, we simply have nowhere to get them.”

Meanwhile, another faction, the Lugansk People’s Republic, blamed Ukraine, saying in a statement: “Witnesses watching the flight of the Boeing 777 passenger plane saw it being attacked by a battle plane of the Ukrainian forces.

“After that the passenger plane split in two in the air and fell on the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic.”

Alexander KHUDOTEPLY/AFP/Getty ImagesA firefighter sprays water to extinguish a fire, on July 17, 2014, amongst the wreckages of the malaysian airliner carrying 295 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur after it crashed, near the town of Shaktarsk, in rebel-held east Ukraine.

President Barack Obama, who had scheduled a call to the Russian president Vladimir Putin to discuss ongoing sanctions against Russia, briefly discussed the plane crash, though news had only reached Putin minutes before the call.

Later in the evening, as word filtered through that 23 Americans and up to nine Britons were believed to be among the dead, the scale of the diplomatic crisis facing both President Obama and David Cameron was becoming clear.

Andrii Kuzmenko, the Ukrainian charge d’affairs, called on Britain to give his country military support to defeat the “terrorists”.

He said: “We would like to hear from the British government comprehensive support of Ukraine at the economical dimension, and at the military and technical dimensions. The support could help us to respond properly to the aggression we are facing.”

Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images
A man wearing military fatigues stands next to the wreckage of the Malaysian airliner.

Meanwhile, the friends and family of Mr Pan and Ms Tol had accepted the worst. Messages on his Facebook page, which hours earlier had been so joyful, spoke only of grief.

One wrote: “There are too many things that go wrong … am afraid it is indeed your plane. Rest in peace Cor and Neel. To the family, a lot of strength with this incredible loss.”

Another added: “I don’t want to believe this is true because this is too awful for words.”

In Malaysia, with the loss of another airliner so soon after MH370, there were familiar sentiments of denial. A close family friend of Captain Eugene Choo Jin Leong, the captain of MH17, said: “We are still holding on to hope because, up till now, no official has contacted us to let us know what has happened. All that we know about what happened is from the television.”

AP Photo/Dmitry LovetskyPeople inspect the crash site of a passenger plane near the village of Grabovo, Ukraine, Thursday, July 17, 2014. Ukraine said a passenger plane carrying 295 people was shot down Thursday as it flew over the country, and both the government and the pro-Russia separatists fighting in the region denied any responsibility for downing the plane.

Zurab Dzhavakhadze/AFP/Getty ImagesA picture taken near the town of Shaktarsk, in rebel-held east Ukraine, on July 17, 2014 shows the wreckage of the Malaysian airliner.

Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty ImagesWreckage of the Malaysian airliner carrying 295 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur after it crashed, near the town of Shaktarsk, in rebel-held east Ukraine.

A Malaysian politician who felt it necessary to equate the German soccer team’s decisive World Cup victory over Brazil Tuesday to Adolf Hitler’s military campaigns has drawn the ire of his colleagues in the Malaysian parliament and Germany’s ambassador to the country.

“Well done. Bravo. Long live Hitler,” MP Datuk Bung Moktar Radin wrote after Germany beat the Brazilians 7-1 in a World Cup semi-final match on Tuesday.

The tweet elicited swift condemnation on Twitter and prompted Germany’s ambassador to Malaysia to express his displeasure in an email to the Malay Mail newspaper.

“While we appreciate the admiration for the German football team, we strongly reject the unacceptable allusion to the fascist regime of Adolf Hitler,” ambassador Holger Michael said.

Bung later clarified that message was intended to mean that “Hitler is part of history and the German team fought like how he did,” he told Malaysian newspaper the Star.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with people sometimes,” he said. “I think people nowadays should transform their mentality. Whatever I tweet people hit me. They are not hitting me because of Hitler, but because I am Bung Mokhtar.”

The MP — who has reportedly found himself in hot water before with sexist and off-colour remarks — replied to dozens of chastising tweets with curt phrases like “Whatever” and “U can get lost.”

On Wednesday, an opposition leader called on Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to distance himself from the MP and “disassociate from Nazism.” Instead, Razak joked publicly that any destabilization of leadership would see Malaysia share the same fate as the humiliated Brazilian soccer team, the Mail reported.

"@shaike49: "@MyKinabatangan: WELL DONE..BRAVO…LONG LIVE HITLER…" low class crazy MP."u can get lost..and enjoy with the loser..

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia’s top court on Monday upheld a lower court ruling that non-Muslims cannot use the word “Allah” to refer to God, adding to a contentious debate that has reinforced complaints that religious minorities are treated unfairly in the Muslim-majority country.

But the implications of the 4-3 ruling by the Federal Court were immersed in confusion after the government issued a tersely-worded statement saying that the ruling only applied to the newspaper in the case, The Herald, a Catholic Malay-language weekly, and that Malaysian Christians can still use the word Allah in church services.

Government officials didn’t clarify whether the ban would apply to Bibles and other published material. Earlier this year, 300 Malay-language Bibles containing the word Allah were seized by Islamic authorities from the office of a Christian group.

Last year’s ruling by the Court of Appeals that banned The Herald from using Allah, saying the term wasn’t integral to the Christian faith and that it would cause confusion. The church had asked the Federal Court to overturn the ruling, but the court decided not to hear the challenge, declaring that the lower court’s decision had been correct.

“We are disappointed. The four judges who denied us the right to appeal did not touch on fundamental basic rights of minorities,” said Rev. Lawrence Andrew, editor of The Herald.

AP Photo/Vincent ThianA Muslim woman holds a banner reading "Allah" during a protest outside the Court of Appeal in Putrajaya, outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Monday, June 23, 2014. The Federal Court on Monday refused to grant leave to hear the appeal by the Catholic church over the word Allah in its newspaper.

The ruling would have a chilling effect on the freedom of religion, guaranteed in the constitution, Andrew said.

“It will confine the freedom of worship,” he said. “We are a minority in this country, and when our rights are curtailed, people feel it.”

The law doesn’t clearly stipulate the penalty for violating the ban, but it appears that a newspaper using the term would lose its license.

The government says Allah should be reserved exclusively for Muslims, who account for nearly two-thirds of the population, arguing that if other religions use the term, that could confuse Muslims and lead them to convert away from Islam.

Christian leaders deny this, arguing that the ban is unreasonable because Christians who speak the Malay language have long used the word in their Bibles, prayers and songs. Christians make up about 9 per cent of the population.

“This is a sad state of affairs that shows how far and fast religious tolerance is falling in Malaysia,” said Phil Robertson, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch. “The Malaysian government should be working to promote freedom of religion rather politically exploiting religious wedge issues.”

The controversy has provoked violence in Malaysia.

AFP PHOTO/ MANAN VATSYAYANAMANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty ImagesMalaysian Muslim activists wait for the verdict outside Malaysia's highest court in Putrajaya on June 23, 2014. Malaysia's highest court on June 23 dismissed a bid by Christians for the right to use the word 'Allah', ending a years-long legal battle that has caused religious tensions in the Muslim-majority country.

Anger over a lower court ruling against the government ban in 2009 led to a string of arson attacks and vandalism at churches and other places of worship. A 2013 judgment by the Court of Appeals reversed that decision, prompting the Catholic church to ask the Federal Court to overturn it.

An umbrella group of Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches in Malaysia said Christians will continue to use the word Allah in their Bibles and worship, saying the court ruling was only confined to the Catholic newspaper.

“We maintain that the Christian community continues to have the right to use the word ’Allah’ in our Bibles, church services and Christian gatherings,” Rev. Eu Hong Seng, chairman of the Christian Federation of Malaysia, said in a statement.

Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters he welcomed the ruling, but said he hoped no groups would politicize the matter and use it to divide races.

“This is an emotional issue that can affect the country’s (racial) harmony. We must handle it with wisdom,” he said. “The court has made a decision, so let’s accept it.”

Some experts believe the Allah issue is an attempt by Prime Minister Najib Razak’s ruling Malay party to strengthen its conservative Muslim voter base. Religion has become an easy tool because government policies have made Islam and Malay identity inseparable.

“This is a situation that is peculiar to Malaysia. It is tied to politics and the identity of Malays. It is a bending of the interpretation of Islam to suit Malay politics and Malay interests,” said Ibrahim Suffian, who heads the Merdeka Center opinion research company.

The issue hasn’t surfaced in other majority Muslim nations with sizeable Christian minorities.

In Egypt, where at least 10 per cent of the population is Christian, both Muslims and Christians refer to God as “Allah,” and this hasn’t generated any controversy or antagonism. Christians often refer to God as “al-Rab” in their liturgy, but use “Allah” more frequently in their daily life.

The same is true for Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Both groups use “Allah” — although Christians pronounce it “Al-lah” and Muslims say “Al-loh,” so you can tell which religion the speaker is — but this hasn’t caused friction.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//malaysias-top-court-rules-non-muslims-cannot-use-the-word-allah/feed/1stdA cyclist rides past Gereja Sidang Jemaat Allah (Grace Assembly of God) Church in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, Monday, June 23, 2014. Malaysia's top court ruled Monday that non-Muslims cannot use the word "Allah" to refer to God, delivering the final word on a contentious debate that has reinforced complaints that religious minorities are treated unfairly in the Muslim-majority country.AP Photo/Vincent ThianAFP PHOTO/ MANAN VATSYAYANAMANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty ImagesJeff Wise: My theory about MH370's final hours was wrong — but so was everyone else'shttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jeff-wise-my-theory-about-mh370s-final-hours-was-wrong-but-so-was-everyone-elses
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jeff-wise-my-theory-about-mh370s-final-hours-was-wrong-but-so-was-everyone-elses#commentsWed, 18 Jun 2014 18:37:06 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=156798

When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing this past March, Slate asked me to cover the peculiar news event. I happily obliged. Two days after my first piece ran, the story took a remarkable turn. The Malaysian government announced that signals received by Inmarsat indicated that the plane had wound up somewhere on a broad arc running from the southern Indian Ocean to Central Asia. The consensus reaction to this stunning news was that it had most likely gone south, into the sea. I weighed the evidence and filed a story arguing that it had more likely gone north. My editor was skeptical. Publishing my claim meant going out on a limb, but I felt that it was a risk worth taking. To ease her concerns, I promised that if I turned out to be wrong, I would write a public apology.

This is that apology.

To be fully honest, I am not super sorry to have blown the call. As Paul Krugman observed last Friday in a mea culpa of his own, there are degrees of wrongness. Krugman differentiates mistakes that arise from a fundamental error in one’s model from those that spring from simple bad luck. In fact, I would put my own mistake about MH370 into a third category: mistakes in which one knows that one has erred but can’t say why.

As I wrote last week, Inmarsat has by now leaked enough clues about MH370’s electronic Inmarsat “handshakes” that outsiders can now understand why, mathematically, the plane must have gone south. Yet we still have not a single clue as to what sequence of events might have taken it there. MH370 looks to be a unique case not just in aviation history. No machine this big, no group of human beings this large, vanished so completely and so mysteriously since the advent of modern technology. What’s more, MH370 didn’t just disappear once, but three times.

The first disappearance, of course, was when it vanished from air traffic controllers’ screens in the early morning hours of March 8, apparently after someone turned off its transponder and automatic status-reporting equipment, and took a hard left turn. Based on the speed and precision of its navigation, the plane almost certainly was under human control.

The second disappearance occurred about an hour later, as the plane slipped beyond the range of military radar. Minutes later, some kind of unknown event caused the plane to transmit a mysterious triple burst of electronic signals to the Inmarsat satellite. At around the same time, the plane took another radical course change, pivoting from a northwest heading toward mainland Asia to a southwestern course that would take it over western Indonesia and out into the open ocean. Based on the slim evidence of subsequent Inmarsat pings, the plane seems to have flown in a simple straight line, so it may not have been under human control at that point.

Then it disappeared a third and final time, this time leaving not a single clue.

What has made the case so difficult to understand isn’t just the scarcity of information concerning its fate, but the superabundance of false clues. In the months that followed the disappearance, I had a front row seat to the flood of bad data. The day my first piece for Slate came out, I was asked to go on CNN, and more or less every day for the next two months I went on air four to six times a day, helping to cover every twist and turn in the saga. (I’m still under contract to the network.) I’m well aware that CNN’s zealousness in covering the story has received its share of ridicule, but for me it was an exhilarating, wild ride, one I’ve likened to having a baby: You’re exhausted and overwhelmed, but at the same time possessed with the sense of being enveloped in an extraordinary and life-changing experience.

Day by day, new developments would come in from sources all around the world, and my fellow analysts and I would try to explain them on air, on the fly. Making our job harder was the fact that in breaking news, a certain fraction of the developments are going to turn out to be erroneous. What to make of reports that the plane had climbed to 45,000 feet after its initial turn, then precipitously dived (faster, it turned out, than the laws of physics would allow)? How excited should we be about the debris that satellites had spotted floating in the southern Indian Ocean (yet never was to be seen again)? How soon before searchers tracked down the sounds coming from the black box acoustic pingers (which turned out not to have come from the black boxes at all)?

The fog of misinformation was made worse by the Malaysian and Australian authorities. Faced with an ever-rising chorus of demands that they explain the search operation, they dragged their heels in releasing basic information, left simple questions unanswered, were slow to correct mistakes, and left huge gaps in the data that they did ultimately release.

Sang Tan/National Post“His ordeal taught the Canadian government to be more proactive in the release of Canadians wrongfully tortured and detained overseas,” Former Liberal MP Dan McTeague says of William Sampson (pictured).

The resulting uncertainty created a playground for amateur theorizers of every stripe, from earnest to wackadoodle. MH370 was a supermarket of facts to pick and choose from as one’s pet theory required. And the Internet gave everyone a chance to go viral in an instant. One of the more intriguing scenarios was put forward by Keith Ledgerwood, who posited that the plane had flown north and evaded radar by shadowing a Singapore Airlines flight. (The flight path turned out not to match the Inmarsat data.) Another that got a lot of play was the theory by Christian Goodfellow that the plane’s initial turn had been made because the flight crew was trying to get the burning airplane to an emergency landing in Langkawi, Malaysia. (Burning planes don’t fly for eight hours—though Goodfellow stands by his opinion )

Vehement passion was, alas, all too common as theories multiplied. I and everyone else who was publicly associated with MH370 was bombarded by emails, tweets, and blog comments offering evidence that solved the mystery once and for all. I soon formed a Pavlovian aversion to the name Tomnod, a crowdsourcing website that parceled out satellite images for the public to pore over. It was remarkable how many clouds, whitecaps, and forest canopies people could mistake for a 777 fuselage, and then proselytize for with deranged fervor. It always baffled me how people could get so attached to their ideas about an incident in which they had no personal stakes.

A confession: I, too, secretly had a theory as to what really happened to MH370. Detailed and complete, it included a perpetrator, an M.O., a flight path, a motive, and a destination. I was so swept up in the convincingness of my idea that I shelled out money from my own pocket for a researcher to do some digging overseas. I was careful not to discuss it publicly, since I knew it made me sound crazy, but as I worked out the kinks of the narrative, I became enveloped in the strange pleasure that one gets from letting one’s thoughts steep in the working out of something beautiful and complicated and true. This is right, I told myself giddily.

Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty ImagesThe coffins of French photojournalist Remi Ochlik and American journalist Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times are wheeled in a hospital in Damascus on March 3, 2012.

Well, suffice it to say that it all hinged on the plane going north. After I realized that it hadn’t, I spent the next few days eating more junk food and watching more TV than usual. Eventually I consoled myself with the thought that if I wasn’t right, at least I’d been able to let go. I wasn’t a wackadoodle.

Nor, as it happened, was I the only one to see my pet theory die. Across the Web, there has come to be a notable absence of coherent attempts at narrative. With Ledgerwood’s and Goodfellow’s theories debunked, no one has been able to come up with a replacement that fits with what eventually emerged as the canonical set of credible facts. To be sure, there’s still a vast army of believers, waving their Tomnod printouts and furiously typing half-literate emails about ACARS data buses. But each is a lone voice shouting into a sea of skepticism.

Even the small cadre of independent experts who have come together to decipher Inmarsat’s data seem to be at loggerheads. Each has made a tentative stab at interpreting the “raw data” released by the satellite company, but the unanswered questions remain so numerous that the group can’t form a consensus about the plane’s fate. The officials looking for the plane don’t seem to be doing much better; according to recent reporting by the Wall Street Journal, the team is riven by fundamental differences of opinion as to where it should look.

So to sum up, this is my mea culpa, and it’s a very tepid one. Yes, I was wrong. But so far — 101 days in and counting — unfortunately, nobody can make a compelling case for what’s right.

Update, June 17, 8:50 a.m.: Today, the BBC is reporting that Inmarsat remains confident that its analysis of the satellite data will lead to the plane, saying that the authorities never searched the area of highest probability because they were distracted by the underwater acoustic pings that turned out not to have come from MH370’s black boxes. Once a new search gets underway, it will explore an area that conforms much better to the likely speed and heading of the missing plane:

By modelling a flight with a constant speed and a constant heading consistent with the plane being flown by autopilot – the team found one flight path that lined up with all its data. “We can identify a path that matches exactly with all those frequency measurements and with the timing measurements and lands on the final arc at a particular location, which then gives us a sort of a hotspot area on the final arc where we believe the most likely area is,” said Mr Ashton.

Unfortunately, it will be several months before such a search of this new area can get underway, since the authorities will first have to survey the ocean floor to figure out how deep it is and what kind of underwater exploration technology—autonomous sub or towed sonar array—will be most appropriate. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Australian organization leading the search described a more complex and ambiguous state of affairs, telling the AFP that experts were still struggling to narrow down the highest-probability search area, taking into consideration not just the satellite data but also “aircraft performance data [and] a range of other information.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jeff-wise-my-theory-about-mh370s-final-hours-was-wrong-but-so-was-everyone-elses/feed/0stdCHINA-MALAYSIA-AVIATION-RELATIVESGREG WOOD/AFP/Getty ImagesAP Photo/Alexander F. YuanSTR/AFP/Getty ImagesMH370 search was in the wrong place for almost two months, officials admithttp://news.nationalpost.com//mh370-search-was-in-the-wrong-place-for-nearly-two-months-officials-admit
http://news.nationalpost.com//mh370-search-was-in-the-wrong-place-for-nearly-two-months-officials-admit#commentsThu, 29 May 2014 18:29:47 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=472281

A deep-sea hunt for the missing Malaysian passenger jet has focused on the wrong place for nearly two months, officials said today, after a survey of a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean found no trace of wreckage.

A zone where acoustic pings like those emitted by aircraft black boxes were detected in early April “can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370,” Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre said in a statement today. The undersea survey using robot submarines will resume over a wider 60,000 square kilometre area in August.

The announcement is the latest setback in what is already the longest search mission of the passenger-jet era. Investigators have scoured waters from the South China Sea to the Southern Ocean without finding a fragment of the Boeing Co. 777-200, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.

“It’s a pretty straightforward case of trying to find a needle in a very big haystack,” Peter Marosszeky, a lecturer in aviation at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said by phone earlier today. “To locate anything on the sea floor is always very difficult.”

Rufus Cox/Getty ImagesThe Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has confirmed that missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is not in the search zone where acoustic pings were detected.

Investigators have scoured a 850-square-kilometre stretch of the ocean floor since April 14 using side-scan sonar, after an underwater microphone picked up four signals like those emitted by aircraft black boxes on April 5 and April 8.

The sonar technology was used to locate the lost Air France 447 aircraft off the coast of Brazil, and can pick out objects less than a meter in size.

“The audible signal sounds to me just like an emergency locator beacon,” the agency’s chief Angus Houston told a media conference April 7 announcing the detection of the first two pings. “We’re very close to where we need to be.”

Kelli Lunt/Australia Department of Defence via Getty ImagesThe Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has confirmed that missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is not in the search zone where acoustic pings were detected.

That survey was called off without success yesterday, and investigators will now use ship-based sonar to assemble a more accurate map of the seabed before resuming the hunt, the Agency said. The renewed undersea search will be carried out by private contractors and won’t start until the seabed mapping is complete in about three months.

“The search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete,” the agency said today. “No signs of aircraft debris have been found.”

The Chinese survey ship Zhu Kezhen has begun mapping areas of the seabed identified by Australian authorities in advance of an undersea search slated to begin in August. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau is preparing a bid request for a single contractor to manage the effort.

The disappearance of Malaysian Airline System Bhd. Flight 370 has baffled authorities because contact was lost less than an hour into a trip to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The jet vanished from civil radar while headed north over the Gulf of Thailand.

In the early days of the search, Vietnamese authorities trawled for floating objects spotted in the South China Sea by a Chinese satellite, before data showed the aircraft had tracked back across the Malay peninsula.

AP Photo/Rob Griffith, FileIn this March 30, 2014 file photo, Australian Defense ship Ocean Shield is docked at naval base HMAS Stirling while being fitted with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and towed pinger locator to aid in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, in Perth, Australia

Indian authorities scoured parts of the Andaman Sea and the coast of Bengal after a tip-off from Malaysia before data from an Inmarsat Plc orbiter indicated the aircraft had turned south toward a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean. The Australian-led search mission in that area at first focused on a zone close to the turbulent Southern Ocean before fresh analysis of satellite and fuel data indicated the plane probably ditched in tropical waters further to the north.

Data exchanges with the Inmarsat satellite, including a last burst when fuel exhaustion seems to have interrupted the electrical supply, remain the only clues to where the plane went down.

Analysis of the time the signals took to travel to and from the satellite, the degree of distortion in the transmissions, and the fuel load on the jet led investigators to narrow the crash zone down to the ocean off the West Australian coast.

EPA/AHMAD YUSNI A Malaysian police boat patrols near the Naniwa Maru 1 at Port Klang near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 23 April 2014. Five armed suspects robbed the Japanese oil tanker of two million litres of diesel and were believed to have seized three crew members while traversing the Straits of Malacca near the Malaysian capital, marine police said. The armed men boarded the Japanese vessel before dawn on 22 April about 29.

Investigators have scanned 4.6 million square kilometres of ocean surface, with 29 aircraft carrying out 334 flights and 14 ships afloat as part of the operation, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said at a May 5 press conference.

In its budget earlier this month, the country’s government set aside A$89.9 million ($83 million) in costs for the hunt over the two years ending June 2015.

The failure to find wreckage in the area suggests the original pings probably didn’t come from the plane’s onboard data or voice recorders, Michael Dean, the U.S. Navy’s deputy director of ocean engineering, said in an interview with CNN yesterday,

“I’d have to say at this point based on all of the imagery data that we’ve collected and looked at, if that black box were nearby we would have picked it up,” he told CNN. “We may very well have been in the wrong place.”

AP Photo/Greg Wood, PoolIn this photo taken from the Royal New Zealand air force (RNZAF) P-3K2-Orion aircraft, Australian ship HMAS Perth sails into position to retrieve a red object spotted by the RNZAF plane during the search for debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of western Australia on Sunday, April 13, 2014.

The signals may have been caused by the search vessel itself or the Towed Pinger Locator, an underwater microphone designed to pick up sonar signals from black box emergency beacons, CNN cited him as saying.

It’s possible that the acoustic pings were interference from other ships in the area or sonar equipment, Ken Mathews, a former air accident investigator for New Zealand’s Transport Accident Investigation Commission, said by phone from the Australian city of Cairns today.

“There can be acoustics in the ocean that can sound similar to those pings,” he said.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Pirates stopped a Singapore-owned tanker in the Malacca Strait and stole several million litres of diesel fuel it was carrying, Malaysian marine police said Wednesday.

Marine police deputy commander Abdul Rahim Abdullah said the tanker was sailing from Singapore to Myanmar when it was boarded by up to 10 pirates armed with pistols and machetes early Tuesday off Klang port.

Abdul Rahim said two other tankers appeared and an estimated 3 million litres, of the 5 million litres of diesel on board the vessel, were transferred over a span of several hours.

He said the ship’s captain, chief engineer and a supporting crewmember — all Indonesians — were found missing along with their passports and belongings. Authorities are probing the possibility that the three may be involved in the robbery.

“We are doing a thorough investigation. We have ruled out kidnapping because no ransom demand has been made,” he told the Associated Press.

EPA/AHMAD YUSNI A Malaysian police boat patrols near the Naniwa Maru 1 at Port Klang near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 23 April 2014. Five armed suspects robbed the Japanese oil tanker of two million litres of diesel and were believed to have seized three crew members while traversing the Straits of Malacca near the Malaysian capital, marine police said. The armed men boarded the Japanese vessel before dawn on 22 April about 29.

The ship is now anchored at Klang port outside Kuala Lumpur for further investigations, he said.

Initial reports said it was a Japanese tanker but Abdul Rahim said the ship has been sold to a Singapore company.

The narrow Malacca Strait, shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, is a major shipping route for oil as it is the shortest sea route between the Middle East and Asia. One-third of the world’s shipping trade goes through it.
Piracy, mainly low-level thefts, had been declining following maritime patrols by the three countries, but attacks appeared to have picked up last year in Malaysian and Indonesian waters.

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]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//pirates-raid-singapore-tanker-off-malaysia-to-steal-3-million-litres-of-diesel-fuel-three-crew-missing/feed/0stdThe Naniwa Maru 1 tanker ship is anchored at Port Klang near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 23 April 2014. Five armed suspects robbed the Japanese oil tanker of two million litres of diesel meant for Myanmar and are believed to have seized three crew members while traversing the Straits of Malacca near the Malaysian capital, marine police said.EPA/AHMAD YUSNI Cyclone bears down on Flight MH370 search area as unmanned sub turns up no new clueshttp://news.nationalpost.com//cyclone-bears-down-on-flight-mh370-search-area-as-unmanned-sub-turns-up-no-new-clues
http://news.nationalpost.com//cyclone-bears-down-on-flight-mh370-search-area-as-unmanned-sub-turns-up-no-new-clues#commentsMon, 21 Apr 2014 17:20:19 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=456008

PERTH, Australia — As the search continued off the coast of Australia for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet on Monday, the airline announced another plane bound for India was forced to make an emergency landing after one of its tires burst on takeoff.

All 159 passengers and seven crew members arrived safely back in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, about 2 a.m. on Monday, around four hours after the plane took off for Bangalore, India. The incident brought additional drama to an airline already under immense pressure for answers from the public and the families of those missing from Flight 370, more than six weeks after it departed the same airport.

Meanwhile, a robotic submarine continued scouring a desolate patch of silt-covered seafloor in the Indian Ocean for any trace of the missing plane. The unmanned sub has spent nearly a week searching for the plane’s black boxes and has covered about two-thirds of its focused search area. But it has yet to uncover any clues that could shed light on the plane’s mysterious disappearance.

The U.S. Navy’s Bluefin 21 has made eight trips below the surface to scan the seabed far off the coast of western Australia, journeying beyond its recommended depth of 4 1/2 kilometers. Its search area forms a 10-kilometer radius around the location of an underwater signal that was believed to have come from the aircraft’s black boxes. The search coordination center said the sonar scan of the seafloor in that area was expected to be completed sometime this week.

Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein has stressed the importance of the weekend’s submarine missions, but added that even if no debris was recovered, the scope of the search may be broadened or other assets may be used.

The search for debris on the ocean surface also continued Monday, with up to 10 military aircraft and 11 ships combing a 49,500 square kilometer area, about 1,700 kilometers northwest of Perth, the search coordination center said. A cyclone was swirling over the ocean northwest of the search area, and was expected to bring increasing rain and winds to the northern section of the search zone later Monday.

The search coordination center has said the hunt for floating debris will continue through at least Tuesday.

Radar and satellite data show the jet veered far off course on March 8 for unknown reasons and would have run out of fuel in the remote section of ocean where the search has been focused. Not one piece of debris has been recovered since the massive multinational hunt began.

There have been numerous leads, but all have turned out to be false. The most promising development came when four underwater signals were detected April 5 and 8. The sounds were consistent with pings that would have been emanating from the plane’s flight data and cockpit recorders’ beacons before their batteries died.

AP Photo/Rob Griffith, FileFILE - In this March 31, 2014 file photo, a shadow of a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion aircraft is seen on low cloud cover while it searches for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean. From the disappearances of aviator Amelia Earhart to labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa, there’s just something about a good mystery that Americans find too tantalizing to resist. Perhaps that's why the saga of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has continued to rivet the country long after people elsewhere have moved on.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//cyclone-bears-down-on-flight-mh370-search-area-as-unmanned-sub-turns-up-no-new-clues/feed/3stdIn this Thursday, April 17, 2014 photo provided by the Australian Defense Force the Phoenix International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Artemis is craned over the side of Australian Defense Vessel Ocean Shield before launching the vehicle into the southern Indian Ocean in the search of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Up to 11 aircraft and 12 ships continue to scan the ocean surface for debris from the Boeing 777 that disappeared March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.AP Photo/Rob Griffith, FileMH370 sub should finish its search in one weekhttp://news.nationalpost.com//robotic-sub-should-finish-seabed-search-in-focused-area-for-missing-malaysia-plane-in-1-week
http://news.nationalpost.com//robotic-sub-should-finish-seabed-search-in-focused-area-for-missing-malaysia-plane-in-1-week#commentsSat, 19 Apr 2014 14:16:39 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=455724

PERTH, Australia — An underwater robotic submarine is expected to finish searching a narrowed down area of the Indian Ocean seabed for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane within the next week, after completing six missions and so far coming up empty, the search co-ordinationcentre said Saturday.

As the hunt for Flight 370 hit week six, the Bluefin 21 unmanned sub began its seventh trip into the depths off the coast off western Australia. Its search area forms a 10-kilometre circle around the location of an underwater signal that was believed to have come from the aircraft’s black boxes before the batteries died. The sonar scan of the seafloor in that area is expected to be completed in five to seven days, the centre said in an email to The Associated Press.

The U.S. Navy sub has covered around 133 square kilometres since it began diving into the depths March 14. The latest data are being analyzed, but nothing has yet been identified.

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Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters in Kuala Lumpur that there are no plans to give up once the Bluefin concludes its work. Instead, he said the scope of the search may be broadened or other assets may be used.

“The search will always continue,” he said. “It is just a matter of approach. All efforts will be intensified for the next few days with regards to the underwater search.”

Meanwhile on Saturday, up to 11 aircraft and 12 ships continued to scan the ocean surface for debris from the Boeing 777 that disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Radar and satellite data show the plane mysteriously veered far off-course for unknown reasons and would have run out of fuel in the remote section of the southern Indian Ocean where the search has been focused. Not one piece of debris has been recovered since the massive search effort began.

The tiresome search that continues to raise more questions than answers has tormented the families whose loved ones never came home March 8. About two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese.

On Friday, around three dozen Chinese relatives in Beijing held a prayer meeting for their missing spouses. Many sobbed heavily as candles burned on a table in the shape of a heart with the letters MH370 in the middle. A banner behind them read in Chinese: “Husband, wife, come home soon.”

There have been numerous leads throughout the painstaking hunt, but all have turned out to be false. The latest hope involved an oil slick found near the underwater search area, but analysis of a sample taken from the site found it was not connected to the plane.

The most promising development came when four underwater signals were detected April 5 and 8. The sounds were consistent with pings that would have been emanating from the flight data and cockpit recorders’ beacons before their batteries died.

The underwater operation is being complicated by the depth of the largely unexplored silt-covered sea floor. The U.S. Navy’s unmanned submarine has gone beyond its recommended limit of 4,500 metres, according to the U.S. 7th Fleet. That could risk the equipment, but it is being closely monitored.

The search co-ordinationcentre has said the hunt for floating debris on the surface will continue at least into next week, even though head of the search effort Angus Houston had earlier said it was expected to end sooner.

On Saturday, the visual surface search was to cover an estimated 50,200 square kilometres of sea.

EPA/LSIS JAMES WHITTLE/AUSTRALIAN DEFENSE DEPARTMENT HANDOUTA handout picture made available by the Australian Department of Defense (DOD) on 19 April 2014 shows the HMA Ships Success and Toowoomba conducting a Replenishment with United States Navy Ship (USNS) Cesar Chavez, as USNS Cesar Chavez's Super Puma helicopter conducts Vertical Replenishment, during the search of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, at sea in the southern Indian Ocean on 12 April 2014.

The search area for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 jet has proved too deep for a robotic submarine which was hauled back to the surface of the Indian Ocean less than halfway through its first seabed hunt for wreckage and the all-important black boxes, authorities said on Tuesday.

Search crews sent the U.S. Navy’s Bluefin 21 deep into the Indian Ocean on Monday to begin scouring the seabed for the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 after failing for six days to detect any signals believed to be from its black boxes.

But just six hours into its planned 16-hour mission on the sea bed, the unmanned sub exceeded its maximum depth limit of 4,500 metres and its built-in safety feature returned it to the surface, the search coordination centre said in a statement.

The data collected by the Bluefin on Monday was analyzed after it returned to the surface and nothing of interest was found, the U.S. Navy said in a statement. Search crews were hoping to send it back under water on Tuesday, if weather conditions permit.

Search authorities knew that the primary wreckage from Flight 370 was likely lying at the limit of the Bluefin’s dive capabilities. Deeper diving submersibles have been evaluated, but none is yet available to help.

The Bluefin was programmed to hover 30 metres over the seafloor as it moved through the search area, but ended up reaching its maximum depth, triggering the safety feature that returned it to the surface, the U.S. Navy said. It wasn’t damaged and is being reprogrammed to account for the inconsistencies in the seafloor’s depth.

AP Photo/U.S. Navy, Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair, FileIn this April 1, 2014 file photo, provided by the U.S. Navy, the Bluefin 21 autonomous sub is hoisted back on board the Australian Defense Vessel Ocean Shield after successful buoyancy testing in the Indian Ocean, as search efforts continue for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

A safety margin would have been included in the sub’s program to protect the device from harm if it went a bit deeper than its 4,500-meter limit, said Stefan Williams, a professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney.

“Maybe some areas where they are doing the survey are a little bit deeper than they are expecting,” he said. “They may not have very reliable prior data for the area, so they have a general idea. But there may be some variability on the sea floor that they also can’t see from the surface.”

AP Photo/Australian Defense ForceIn this Monday, April 14, 2014, photo provided by the Australian Defense Force Phoenix International's Chris Minor, right, and Curt Newport inspect an autonomous underwater vehicle before it is deployed from ADV Ocean Shield in the search of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, officials were investigating an oil slick about 5,500 metres from the area where the last underwater sounds were detected, said Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search off Australia’s west coast.

Crews have collected an oil sample and are sending it back to Perth in western Australia for analysis, a process that will take several days. Houston said it does not appear to be from any of the ships in the area, but cautioned against jumping to conclusions about its source.

The Bluefin can create a three-dimensional sonar map of any debris on the ocean floor. But the search in this area is more challenging because the seabed is covered in silt that could potentially cover part of the plane.

“What they’re going to have to be looking for is contrast between hard objects, like bits of a fuselage, and that silty bottom,” Williams said. “With the types of sonars they are using, if stuff is sitting up on top of the silt, say a wing was there, you could likely see that … but small items might sink down into the silt and be covered and then it’s going to be a lot more challenging.”

The search moved below the surface after crews picked up a series of underwater sounds over the past two weeks that were consistent with signals from an aircraft’s black boxes, which record flight data and cockpit conversations. The devices emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but their batteries only last about a month and are now believed to be dead.

AP Photo/Greg Wood, PoolIn this photo taken from the Royal New Zealand air force (RNZAF) P-3K2-Orion aircraft, Australian ship HMAS Perth sails into position to retrieve a red object spotted by the RNZAF plane during the search for debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of western Australia on Sunday, April 13, 2014.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott raised hopes last week when he said authorities were “very confident” the four strong underwater signals that were detected were from the black boxes on Flight 370, which disappeared March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board, mostly Chinese.

But Houston warned that while the signals are a promising lead, the public needs to be realistic about the challenges facing search crews in the extremely remote, deep patch of ocean.

“I would caution you against raising hopes that the deployment of the autonomous underwater vehicle will result in the detection of the aircraft wreckage,” Houston said Monday. “It may not.”

The submarine takes 24 hours to complete each mission: two hours to dive to the bottom, 16 hours to search the seafloor, two hours to return to the surface, and four hours to download the data.

AP Photo/Greg Wood, PoolIn this photo taken from the Royal New Zealand air force (RNZAF) P-3K2-Orion aircraft, pilot and aircraft captain, Flight Lieutenant Timothy McAlevey looks out of a window while searching for debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of western Australia on Sunday, April 13, 2014.

The black boxes could contain the key to unraveling the mystery of what happened to Flight 370. Investigators believe the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean based on a flight path calculated from its contacts with a satellite and an analysis of its speed and fuel capacity. But they still don’t know why.

On Tuesday, Malaysia’s defense minister, Hishamuddin Hussein, pledged to reveal the full contents of the black boxes, if they are ever found.

“It’s about finding out the truth,” he told reporters in Kuala Lumpur. “There is no question of it not being released.”

Up to 11 planes and as many ships were on Tuesday scouring a 62,000 square kilometre patch of ocean about 2,200 kilometres northwest of Perth, hunting for any floating debris.

But the weeks-long surface search was expected to end in the next two days. Officials haven’t found a single piece of debris confirmed to be from the plane, and Houston said the chances that any would be found have “greatly diminished.”

Australia’s prime minister said Friday that authorities are confident that a series of underwater signals detected in a remote patch of the Indian Ocean are coming from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 plane.

Tony Abbott told reporters in Shanghai, China, that search crews had significantly narrowed down the area they were hunting for the source of the sounds, first detected on Saturday.

We are very confident that the signals that we are detecting are from the black box on MH370

“We have very much narrowed down the search area and we are very confident that the signals that we are detecting are from the black box on MH370,” Abbott said.

“Nevertheless, we’re getting into the stage where the signal from what we are very confident is the black box is starting to fade,” he added. “We are hoping to get as much information as we can before the signal finally expires.”

AP Photo/Paul Kane, FileAustralian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, right, chats with his Malaysian counterpart Najib Razak at Perth International Airport on April 3 as Razak prepares to depart Australia after his visit during the search of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, in Perth, Australia.

The plane’s black boxes, or flight data and cockpit voice recorders, could help solve the mystery of why Flight 370 veered so far off course when it vanished on March 8 on a trip from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. But the batteries powering their locator beacons last only about a month – and it has been more than a month since the plane disappeared.

The Australian ship Ocean Shield, which is towing a U.S. Navy device to detect signals emanating from the beacons on a plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders, first picked up two underwater sounds on Saturday that were later determined to be consistent with the pings emitted from the flight recorders, or “black boxes.” The ship’s equipment detected two more sounds in the same general area on Tuesday.

“We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometres, but confidence in the approximate position of the black box is not the same as recovering wreckage from almost 4 1/2 kilometres beneath the sea or finally determining all that happened on that flight,” Abbott said.

EPA/ABIS NICOLAS GONZALEZThe HMAS Perth transiting at sea during the search for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean on April 5, 2014.

An Australian air force P-3 Orion, which has been dropping sonar buoys into the water near where four sounds were heard earlier, picked up another “possible signal” on Thursday, but Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search for Flight 370 off Australia’s west coast, said in a statement that an initial assessment of the signal had determined it was not related to an aircraft black box.

Houston said the Ocean Shield was continuing on Friday to use its towed pinger locator to try and locate additional signals. The underwater search zone is currently a 1,300-square-kilometre patch of the ocean floor, about the size of the city of Los Angeles.

“It is vital to glean as much information as possible while the batteries on the underwater locator beacons may still be active,” Houston said in a statement. “The AP-3C Orions continue their acoustic search, working in conjunction with Ocean Shield, with three more missions planned for today.”

EPA / AMSAA handout image released by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) in Canberra, Australia, 11 April 2014 shows the planned search area in the Indian Ocean, West of Australia, for the wreckage of flight MH370 on April 11, 2014.

The Bluefin 21 submersible takes six times longer to cover the same area as the ping locator being towed by the Ocean Shield and would take six weeks to two months to canvass the current underwater search zone.

“On the information I have available to me, there has been no major breakthrough in the search for MH370,” he added. “I will provide a further update if, and when, further information becomes available.”

The searchers are trying to pinpoint the location of the source of the signals so they can send down a robotic submersible to look for wreckage and the flight recorders from the Malaysian jet. Houston said on Friday that that decision could be “some days away.”

Houston’s coordination centre said the area to be searched for floating debris on Friday had been narrowed to 46,713 square kilometres of ocean extending from 2,300 kilometres northwest of Perth. Up to 15 planes and 13 ships would join Friday’s search.

Thursday’s search of a 57,900 square kilometre area of ocean in a similar location reported no sightings of potential wreckage, the center said.

The sonar buoys are being dropped by the Australian air force to maximize the sound-detectors operating in the search zone. Royal Australian Navy Commodore Peter Leavy said each buoy is dangling a hydrophone listening device about 300 metres below the surface and transmits its data via radio back to a search plane.

Houston has expressed optimism about the sounds detected earlier in the week, saying Wednesday that he was hopeful crews would find the aircraft – or what’s left of it – in the “not-too-distant future.”

Separately, a Malaysian government official said Thursday that investigators have concluded the pilot spoke the last words to air traffic control, “Good night, Malaysian three-seven-zero,” and that his voice had no signs of duress. A re-examination of the last communication from the cockpit was initiated after authorities last week reversed their initial statement that the co-pilot was speaking different words.

The senior government official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media.

EPA/LSIS JAMES WHITTLE/DODA handout photo made available by the Australian Department of Defense (DOD) on April 10, 2014 shows the HMAS Toowoomba searching for debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 at sea in the Indian Ocean on April 5, 2014.

AP PhotoA woman ties a message card for passengers onboard the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 at a shopping mall in Petaling Jaya, near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Thursday, April 10, 2014. With hopes high that search crews are zeroing in on the missing Malaysian jetliner's crash site, ships and planes hunting for the aircraft intensified their efforts Thursday after equipment picked up sounds consistent with a plane's black box in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean.

Three separate but fleeting sounds from deep in the Indian Ocean offered new hope Sunday in the hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, as officials rushed to determine whether they were signals from the plane’s black boxes before their beacons fall silent.

The head of the multinational search being conducted off Australia’s west coast confirmed that a Chinese ship had picked up electronic pulsing signals twice in a small patch of the search zone, once on Friday and again on Saturday.

On Sunday, an Australian ship carrying sophisticated deep-sea sound equipment picked up a third signal in a different part of the massive search area.

“This is an important and encouraging lead, but one which I urge you to treat carefully,” retired Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search, told reporters in Perth.

Houston stressed that the signals had not been verified as being linked to Flight MH370, which was traveling from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing when it disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board. Experts, meanwhile, expressed doubt that the equipment aboard the Chinese ship was capable of picking up signals from the black boxes.

“We have an acoustic event. The job now is to determine the significance of that event. It does not confirm or deny the presence of the aircraft locator on the bottom of the ocean,” Houston said, referring to each of the three transmissions.

There are lots of noises in the ocean

“We are dealing with very deep water, we are dealing with an environment where sometimes you can get false indications,” he said. “There are lots of noises in the ocean, and sometimes the acoustic equipment can rebound, echo if you like.”

China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported Saturday that the patrol vessel Haixun 01 detected a “pulse signal” Friday in the southern Indian Ocean at 37.5 kilohertz – the same frequency emitted by the flight data recorders aboard the missing plane.

AP Photo/Xinhua, Huang ShuboThis Saturday, April 5, 2014 photo, shows a piece of a white floating object, inside a white circle which was added by the source, spotted by Chinese air force in the southern Indian Ocean. Retired Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search, said China reported seeing white objects floating in the sea in the area.

Houston confirmed the report, and said the Haixun 01 detected a signal again on Saturday within 2 kilometres of the original signal, for 90 seconds. He said China also reported seeing white objects floating in the sea in the area.

The British navy ship HMS Echo, which is fitted with sophisticated sound-locating equipment, is moving to the area where the signals were picked up and will probably get there early Monday, Houston said.

The Australian navy’s Ocean Shield, which is carrying high-tech sound detectors from the U.S. Navy, will also head there, but will first investigate the sound it picked up in its current region, about 555 kilometers away, he said.

Australian air force assets are also being deployed into the Haixun 01’s area to try to confirm or discount the signals’ relevance to the search, Houston said.

In Kuala Lumpur, families of passengers aboard the missing plane attended a prayer service on Sunday that also drew thousands of Malaysian sympathizers.

“This is not a prayer for the dead because we have not found bodies. This is a prayer for blessings and that the plane will be found,” said Liow Tiong Lai, the president of the government coalition party that organized the two-hour session.

Two Chinese women were in tears and hugged by their caregivers after the rally. Many others looked somber, and several wore white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Pray for MH370.”

Two-thirds of the passengers aboard Flight MH370 were Chinese, and a group of relatives has been in Kuala Lumpur for most of the past month to follow the investigation. Liow said some of them were planning to go home on Sunday.

After weeks of fruitless looking, the multinational search team is racing against time to find the sound-emitting beacons and cockpit voice recorders that could help unravel the mystery of the plane. The beacons in the black boxes emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but the batteries last for only about a month.

Investigators believe Flight MH370 veered way off-course and came down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, though they have not been able to explain why it did so.

The crew of the Chinese ship reportedly picked up the signals using a hand-held sonar device called a hydrophone dangled over the side of a small runabout – something experts said was technically possible but extremely unlikely.

The equipment aboard the Ocean Shield and the HMS Echo are dragged slowly behind each ship over long distances and are considered far more sophisticated than those the Chinese crew was using.

Footage aired on China’s state-run CCTV showed crew members in the small boat with a device shaped like a large soup can attached to a pole. It was hooked up by cords to electronic equipment in a padded suitcase as they poked the device into the water.

We are hopeful but by no means certain

“If the Chinese have discovered this, they have found a new way of finding a needle in a haystack,” said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com. “Because this is amazing. And if it proves to be correct, it’s an extraordinarily lucky break.”

There are many clicks, buzzes and other sounds in the ocean from animals, but the 37.5 kilohertz pulse was selected for underwater locator beacons because there is nothing else in the sea that would naturally make that sound, said William Waldock, an expert on search and rescue who teaches accident investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

“They picked that [frequency] so there wouldn’t be false alarms from other things in the ocean,” he said.

JASON REED/AFP/Getty ImagesThis photograph taken on March 29, 2014 shows the Chinese ship Nan Hai Jiu pictured in the southern Indian Ocean from the flight deck of a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3K2 Orion aircraft searching for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.

But after weeks of false alarms, officials were careful Sunday not to overplay the development.

“We are hopeful but by no means certain,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said of the detection of the signals.

“This is the most difficult search in human history. We need to be very careful about coming to hard and fast conclusions too soon,” Abbott told reporters during a visit to Japan.

The search area has evolved as experts analyzed Flight MH370’s limited radar and satellite data, moving from the seas off Vietnam, to the waters west of Malaysia and Indonesia, and then to several areas west of Australia.

Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty ImagesThis photograph taken on July 24, 2013 shows crew members standing on the deck of the vessel "Haixun 01"

A senior Malaysian government official said Sunday that investigators have determined that the plane skirted Indonesian airspace as it flew from Peninsular Malaysia to the southern Indian Ocean.

The official, who declined to be named because he isn’t authorized to speak to the media, said Indonesian authorities have confirmed that the plane did not show up on their military radar. The plane could have deliberately flown around Indonesian airspace to avoid radar detection, or may have coincidentally traveled out of radar range, he said.

Houston, the search coordinator, conceded that his organization first heard about the initial signal China had detected when it was reported by a Chinese journalist aboard the Haixun 01. He said that at “almost the same time” he was informed of the development by the Chinese government.

China is sharing everything that is relevant to this search

The agency was formally told about the second Chinese detection on Saturday “in absolutely the normal way,” he said.

“China is sharing everything that is relevant to this search. Everything,” Houston said.

Still, the search agency will be adding a Chinese-speaking liaison officer “to make sure nothing falls through the cracks,” he said.

Houston also said there had been a correction to satellite data that investigators have been using to calculate Flight MH370’s likely flight pattern. As a result, starting on Monday, the southern section of the current search zone will be given higher priority than the northern part.

The signals detected by the Chinese ship were in the southern high priority zone, Houston said.

Up to 12 military and civilian planes and 13 ships took part in the search Sunday of three areas totaling about 216,000 square kilometers (83,400 square miles). The areas are about 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) northwest of the Australian west coast city of Perth.

PERTH, Australia — A Chinese ship involved in the hunt for the missing Malaysian jetliner reported hearing a “pulse signal” Saturday in southern Indian Ocean waters with the same frequency emitted by the plane’s data recorders, as Malaysia vowed not to give up the search for the aircraft.

The Australian government agency coordinating the search for the missing plane said early Sunday that the electronic pulse signals reportedly detected by the Chinese ship are consistent with those of an aircraft black box. But retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, the head of the search coordination agency, said they “cannot verify any connection” at this stage between the electronic signals and the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Military and civilian planes, ships with deep-sea searching equipment and a British nuclear submarine scoured a remote patch of the southern Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast, in an increasingly urgent hunt for debris and the “black box” recorders that hold vital information about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s last hours.

After weeks of fruitless looking, the multinational search team is racing against time to find the sound-emitting beacons in the flight and cockpit voice recorders that could help unravel the mystery of the plane’s fate. The beacons in the black boxes emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but the batteries only last for about a month.

A Chinese ship that is part of the search effort detected a “pulse signal” in southern Indian Ocean waters, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported. Xinhua, however, said it had not yet been determined whether the signal was related to the missing plane, citing the China Maritime Search and Rescue Center.

Xinhua said a black box detector deployed by the ship, Haixun 01, picked up a signal at 37.5 kilohertz (cycles per second), the same frequency emitted by flight data recorders.

Earlier Saturday, Xinhua reported that a Chinese military aircraft searching for the missing aircraft spotted “white floating objects” not far from where the electronic signals were detected.

Finding floating wreckage is key to narrowing the search area, as officials can then use data on currents to backtrack to where the plane hit the water, and where the flight recorders may be.

Houston said the Australian-led Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the search operation could not yet verify the Chinese reports and had asked China for “any further information that may be relevant.” He said the Australian air force was considering deploying more aircraft to the area where the Chinese ship reportedly detected the sounds.

“I have been advised that a series of sounds have been detected by a Chinese ship in the search area. The characteristics reported are consistent with the aircraft black box,” Houston said, adding that the Australian-led agency had also received reports of the white objects sighted on the ocean surface about 90 kilometers (56 miles) from where the electronic signals were detected.

“However, there is no confirmation at this stage that the signals and the objects are related to the missing aircraft,” Houston said.

There are many clicks, buzzes and other sounds in the ocean from animals, but the 37.5 kilohertz pulse was selected for underwater locator beacons on black boxes because there is nothing else in the sea that would naturally make that sound, said William Waldock, an expert on search and rescue who teaches accident investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

“They picked that (frequency) so there wouldn’t be false alarms from other things in the ocean,” he said.

Honeywell Aerospace, which made the boxes in the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, said the Underwater Acoustic Beacons on both the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder operate at a frequency of 37.5 kilohertz plus or minus 1 kilohertz.

Waldock cautioned that “it’s possible it could be an aberrant signal” from a nuclear submarine if there was one in the vicinity.

If the sounds can be verified, it would reduce the search area to about 10 square kilometers (4 square miles), Waldock said. Unmanned robot subs with sidescan sonar would then be sent into the water to try to locate the wreckage, he said.

John Goglia, a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board member, called the report “exciting,” but cautioned that “there is an awful lot of noise in the ocean.”

“One ship, one ping doesn’t make a success story,” he said. “It will have to be explored. I guarantee you there are other resources being moved into the area to see if it can be verified.”

The Boeing 777 disappeared March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people aboard. So far, no trace of the jet has been found.

Hishammuddin, the Malaysian defense minister, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur that the cost of mounting the search was immaterial compared to providing solace for the families of those on board by establishing what happened.

EPA/ABIS JULIANNE CROPLEY/AUSTRALIAN DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCEA handout picture made available by the Australian Department of Defense (DOD) on 02 April 2014 shows the HMAS Success searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, at sea in the southern Indian Ocean, 31 March 2013.

“I can only speak for Malaysia, and Malaysia will not stop looking for MH370,” Hishammuddin said.

He said an independent investigator would be appointed to lead a team that will try to determine what happened to Flight 370. The team will include three groups: One will look at airworthiness, including maintenance, structures and systems; another will examine operations, such as flight recorders and meteorology; and a third will consider medical and human factors.

The investigation team will include officials and experts from several nations, including Australia – which as the nearest country to the search zone is currently heading the hunt – China, the United States, Britain and France, Hishammuddin said.

Officials have said the hunt for the wreckage is among the hardest ever undertaken, and will get much harder if there are no confirmed debris sightings and the beacons fall silent before they are found.

If that happens, the only hope for finding the plane may be a full survey of the Indian Ocean floor, an operation that would take years and an enormous international operation.

Hishammuddin said there were no new satellite images or data that can provide new leads for searchers. The focus now is fully on the ocean search, he said.

Two ships – the Australian navy’s Ocean Shield and the British HMS Echo – carrying sophisticated equipment that can hear the recorders’ pings returned Saturday to an area investigators hope is close to where the plane went down. They concede the area they have identified is a best guess.

Up to 13 military and civilian planes and nine other ships took part in the search Saturday, the Australian agency coordinating the search said.

Because the U.S. Navy’s pinger locator can pick up signals to a depth of 6,100 meters (20,000 feet), it should be able to hear the plane’s data recorders even if they are in the deepest part of the search zone – about 5,800 meters (19,000 feet). But that’s only if the locator gets within range of the black boxes – a tough task, given the size of the search area and the fact that the pinger locator must be dragged slowly through the water at just 1 to 5 knots (1 to 6 mph).

Australia’s Houston acknowledged the search area was essentially a best guess, and noted the time when the plane’s locator beacons would shut down was “getting pretty close.”

The overall search area is a 217,000-square-kilometer (84,000-square-mile) zone in the southern Indian Ocean, about 1,700 kilometers (1,100 miles) northwest of the western Australian city of Perth.